Carrier aggregation allows increased bandwidth and, as such, increased data rates to a user equipment by aggregating carriers. For example, a user equipment may be allocated a primary carrier serving a primary cell (PCell) and one or more secondary carriers serving corresponding secondary cells (SCells). These carriers may be continuous within the same frequency band, non-contiguous within a given frequency band, or non-contiguous among frequency bands.
Blind SCell configuration refers to a network configuring one or more SCells for a user equipment, without the user equipment first detecting and/or reporting the SCells to the network. As such, before the user equipment detects and/or reports a cell to the network, the network has blindly configured the cell as a SCell for the user equipment, so the SCell is available for the user equipment when the user equipment subsequently detects SCell and SCell is activated. Although the network knows when configuring a given SCell blindly that the user equipment has not yet detected the SCell, the network presumes the user equipment (given its current location based on for example a current serving PCell) will at some point detect the SCell and activate the SCell to enable data transmission through the SCell.